Aryanne Oade - Building Influence in the Workplace: How to Gain and Retain Influence at Work

Building Influence in the Workplace

HOW TO GAIN AND RETAIN INFLUENCE AT WORK

Aryanne Oade

Director, Oade Associates Limited

Aryanne Oade 2010

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First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN 978-0-230-23773-5

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Aryanne Oade has worked as a Chartered Psychologist since 1991. She has appeared on Channel 4 television speaking about customer complaints handling, has given an address on Creativity in Business at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and has appeared on Radio 4 speaking on the same topic. Aryanne has spoken at the Leeds and York Institute of Directors Breakfast Meetings on Politics, Power and Profit, and at the British Psychological Societys Annual Conference on Stress Levels Among South Yorkshire Probation Officers. She is a member of the British Psychological Societys Special Group in Coaching Psychology, and holds general membership at the Societys Division of Occupational Psychology. Aryanne is also a member of the Association for Coaching.

This book focuses on your influencing skills and how you apply them at work when handling a range of colleagues and co-workers. In writing the book, I am not seeking to advise you, the reader, on how to handle your workplace relationships, but rather to offer you my experience and know-how as someone who has coached and worked with hundreds of clients on these issues. In addition to reading this book, you might want to seek the services and professional advice of a coach, business psychologist or consultant, each of whom should be able to offer you tailored, detailed and impartial counsel on the more challenging inter-personal and influencing issues you might face at work.

I would like to acknowledge a number of people who have played a part in my work and the writing of this book.

Firstly, my thanks and gratitude go to all the clients who have spoken with me about their experiences of seeking to gain and retain influence at work. I am grateful to the many clients who have shared with me their successes, frustrations, reactions, and strategies for managing and using influential behavior in the workplace. These are perhaps the most frequently recurring concerns that clients bring to coaching meetings, and the ones that most often see them making rapid progress back at the workplace.

Next, I would like to thank the clients and contacts who allowed me to pick their brains at the start of the writing process for this book. These conversations were valuable to me, helping me to decide how to structure and focus its chapters. I send my thanks to each one of you gratefully and anonymously.

Then, Id like to send my appreciation to Julie Perry and Gina Rowland for their helpful critique of the early chapters of the book; and to Arthur Soar for his feedback towards the end of the writing process.

Finally, Id like to acknowledge the contribution of Stephen Rutt and the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their effective collaboration through the production process.

This book is about personal influence at work: what it is, how to gain it, how to retain it, and how to use the influence you have already attained to get things done. It is about your ability to acquire and sustain influence with colleagues with whom you have some shared values and some things in common, as well as being about building and retaining influence with colleagues with whom you have no shared values and very little in common.

The book examines how to build influence with the colleagues you meet every day in your team or department, as well as how to build influence with your organizations opinion-formers and decision-makers, colleagues with whom you might meet infrequently and for short intervals only. The book will help you to understand your own values as an influencer, and enable you to recognize the links between having influence, having power and having responsibility. It considers how to position your influencing arguments with colleagues who have different values from you and who wont be influenced by the factors which readily influence you. It examines how to build influence with irresponsible colleagues and with colleagues who want you to behave in ways that conflict with your wishes. It explores effective ways of raising your profile outside of your department, and effective ways of building influence with internal clients and senior managers. It will equip you with strategies, tactics, techniques and know-how so that you can learn how to consistently use behavior that proves persuasive with all your colleagues and workplace contacts.

The book is written for people at work at any level of an organization in any part of the world. The book outlines the principles for creating and maintaining influential relationships at work, and those principles are relevant across the board. So, whether you work for a small, medium or large organization and no matter which continents you work in, this book should help you to become a more influential member of your organizations workforce.

I wrote this book for the very many of you who go to work and need to get things done in tandem with others in order to be effective in your roles. The main sets of skills you need to be effective day in, day out are influencing skills. You cant use authority to get things done when you work with your peers or your managers, and it isnt considered wise to do so with your team members except when you really need to. On a day-to-day basis you will have to find another way to get done the things you need to get done. You need to go to work every day and establish and maintain effective, influential connections with your colleagues, some of whom you may not naturally like or want to work with, but with whom you need to gain and retain influence if you are to succeed.